A ghost town is an abandoned wiki. At one point they may have had a large community, but for whatever reason there are now no legitimate users. These are the perfect hangouts for Spammers since no one is going to clean the wiki. Useful information can be spammed out of existance as the original clean revisions expire. On a ghost town wiki spammers know they have a chance to leave links which will remain for a long time.
This is a big problem for the wiki community as a whole. In fact it could be argued that the existence of ghost towns is the only reason wiki spamming is worthwhile, and that the wiki community would be better off if such sites were shut down. Of course technically there are better solutions, but they tend to require proactivity on the part of the owner/administrator. One might conclude that people running ghost town wikis are a menace, but of course the true menace is WikiSpam.
If you are running a wiki which is being dogged by WikiSpam, we would like you to follow our AntiSpamRecommendations. However…
If you do not have the time or the inclination, or you do not have the technical skills / know-how, you should at least follow a LazySolution.
Do not just leave your wiki running full of spam, by doing this, you are providing a host for spam links, which makes your wiki part of the problem.
Of course we often find the administrator is not taking action, so as a helpful anti-spam activity, benefiting the wider wiki community, there are a number of things we can do. Some of these actions are somewhat drastic, and have the potential to upset people. We are not recommending that everyone leaps in and starts doing these things, but this is the kind of action which anti-spam people have been taking.
Of course anyone can get stuck in and clean up spam on a wiki. This also helps give a feel for how bad the problem is on this wiki. For large ghost towns this may prove to be too big a task to be attempted by hand. It could be a job for an AntiSpamBot.
If you find that the wiki is completely stuffed with spam, and there is NO legitimate content left (on every page, all the old revisions are spam), then obviously this has become a completely pointless wiki, and it should be shut down.
In other cases you may find that the wiki does still have legitimate content. Often the homepage gets obliterated, but other pages are still OK. It's still a pretty pointless wiki, but some people might see a justification for keeping the wiki running in this case.
The administators and users have abandoned this wiki, but you may still be able to get hold of them, and ask them to take action. To provoke a response from the administrator try leaving a message along these lines:
This is a ghost town wiki. It is so full of wiki spam that there is no legitimate content left, and nobody seems to care. By leaving this wiki operational you are providing a host for spam links. You are making wiki spamming activities more worthwhile. This is a problem for the wider wiki community, and I speak on their behalf when I ask you shut down this wiki or follow some of the simple antispam measures recommended here.
If the homepage has been spammed to oblivion, you could put this message there.
You may have more luck looking around the rest of the website (if there is a website besides the wiki) for email contact details, or other forums. Whois may also give you some contact information if the wiki has its own domain.
If you're feeling really benevolent, you could try to promote the wiki to other wiki enthusiasts, and rekindle the community there, if there is any content to build a community around. Building a community is a difficult process though, and if the administrator is lacking any dedication to this, then it is likely to be a lot more effort than it is worth. They will probably never implement any good anti-spam measures and may take the wiki offline without notice.
There is a trick which we can perform as a user on some OddMuse and UseMod installations (depending on server set-up). We take advantage of a bug which puts the whole wiki into a locked state. This has been used on ghost town wikis to lock out the spammers. Spammers see the lock error and just give up on that wiki (or continue sending edit requests which fail every time).
This also locks out legitimate editors, but we are only talking about doing this on wikis where there are no longer any legitimate editors. Obviously we do this after cleaning all spam from the wiki.
This quite an extreme move, and some people might view it as excessive interfering in other people's wikis, but in cases where the administrator is completely lazy and unresponsive, it can be justified. Remember that ghost town wikis are hosting spam links, which is a problem for the wider wiki community. No permanent damage is done, indeed users can 'unlock' the wiki if they know how.
(Gated community related discussion was moved to AboutPrivateArea page)